Foreign investors have pledged billions of dollars to rebuild Syria’s ports, power plants, and other infrastructure. Now the country faces the challenge of turning those promises into the functioning projects it desperately needs to set right the destruction wrought by its brutal civil war.
The United States and the European Union ended their sanctions against Syria in 2025 and Washington is now moving to remove the country from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Those actions make Syria far easier for foreign firms to enter just as it confronts a reconstruction bill the World Bank estimates at $216 billion.
If the nascent agreements become working projects, they could restore basic services, create jobs, and push the government to strengthen banking and other rules. If they remain memoranda on paper or rely on special protections available only to well-connected companies, Syria could issue impressive announcements without creating an economy that ordinary businesses or citizens can trust. That danger is rooted in Syria’s recent history: for decades, the ruling Assad family steered contracts, monopolies, and other economic privileges toward loyal businessmen, helping a small circle grow rich through its proximity to power.
As much as new Syrian President Ahmad al-Shaara promises a break with the self-dealing and corrupt practices of Bashar al-Assad, the leader he chased into Russian exile in December 2024, there are grounds for doubt. An analysis of Syria’s new investment law by the Middle East Institute found that the executive branch retains wide discretion over licenses, incentives, and access to strategically important sectors. If every company negotiates its own tax benefits, legal protections, and access to state officials, investment could bypass weak institutions rather than strengthen them. The real opportunity is to translate the requirements of early investors into transparent rules that apply beyond a handful of well-connected companies.
Early Bets
The biggest promises so far have come from Syria’s Middle East neighbors. In August 2025, Damascus signed 12 agreements valued at $14 billion, including an airport project and a subway project with Qatar and the UAE, respectively. Those deals followed another package of Saudi investments worth $6.4 billion. The figures refer to signed agreements rather than capital already deployed, but their focus reveals early investors are targeting the power, transportation, and communications systems on which the rest of Syria’s recovery depends.
Western companies are entering more selectively, placing narrower bets in select sectors. French shipping company CMA CGM agreed to invest €230 million under a renewed 30-year concession to manage and expand the Port of Latakia, later extending its role to air cargo operations at Damascus International Airport and two inland ports. In energy, a group of companies signed a memorandum to conduct a technical review of an offshore sector near Latakia, while ConocoPhillips and Novaterra reached a separate agreement intended to revive Syrian gas production. While these investments haven’t yet been realized, the pattern is clear that the first Western entrants are concentrating on energy and logistics even if broader recovery remains uncertain.
Why Investors are moving now
The risks that make Syria difficult to invest in are also part of what makes it attractive to investors willing to wait. Sinan Hatahet, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and vice president for investment and social impact at the Syrian Forum, told MBN that years of isolation left pools of capital in the Gulf and among the Syrian diaspora with few ways to enter the country. “Now, as those constraints ease, investors are positioning to establish footholds before market dynamics shift,” he said.
Conflict and political uncertainty have depressed the value of Syrian assets, while damage to critical infrastructure has created demand across every essential sector. “Assets and opportunities are undervalued because they carry country-risk premiums,” Hatahet said. “For investors with medium to long-term horizons, these conditions are attractive.”
Investors shape the rules
Those investors will have to roll up their sleeves, he suggested. Any company financing a power station, port or transportation network will not simply accept the conditions it finds. It will seek reliable rules for setting prices, protections against currency losses, clear dispute-resolution procedures, and confidence that a contract lasting several decades will survive political change. This could push Syria to establish standards that eventually extend beyond the projects for which they were initially created.
The financial sector offers the clearest example. The IMF has called for greater central bank independence, a review of banks’ financial health and the rehabilitation of Syria’s banking and payment systems. Without functioning banks, Hatahet said, businesses cannot reliably access credit, and infrastructure projects cannot secure long-term financing.
Syria remains selectively investable
For all the new interest, Syria remains a market that only certain investors are equipped to enter. Security is the most immediate constraint. Two bombs wounded 18 people in central Damascus during French President Emmanuel Macron’s July visit, and TotalEnergies’ chief executive said lingering insecurity made a return to onshore oil operations unviable. For a multinational corporation, that risk is the cost of insurance, security, and possible delays. For a smaller company, it can be enough to end a project before it begins.
Then comes the question of what, exactly, an investor in war-ravaged Syria actually owns. Years of destruction and mass displacement have complicated land claims, with a World Bank study warning that destroyed documents and registries could make property ownership extremely difficult to reestablish in some areas. This makes projects requiring large amounts of land particularly vulnerable to disputes involving returning residents, competing owners, or incomplete records.
What’s more, legal permission to invest does not guarantee that money can move easily. Syria’s banking and payment systems still require major rehabilitation, and although Washington ended its comprehensive sanctions program, the U.S. Treasury continues to sanction Assad associates as well as other alleged human-rights abusers, trafficking networks, and terrorist affiliates.
Many members of Assad’s business elite fled when the regime collapsed, leaving behind corporate holdings built through opaque partnerships with the former ruler’s inner circle. That history makes identifying who controls a potential partner or asset especially important. Larger companies can manage those risks with teams of lawyers, extensive compliance checks, and government-backed agreements. Most ordinary companies cannot, which is why Syria is becoming investable for a narrow group of strategic players before it becomes investable in any conventional sense.
What counts as successful investment?
Getting Syria’s new projects off the page will be only the first measure of success. The deeper test is whether this initial wave of capital creates opportunities beyond the companies arriving now. That would mean banks able to finance smaller businesses, rules applied consistently, and a market that does not depend on political connections.
Syria does not just need a handful of companies willing to gamble on its stability. It needs those investments to change the conditions that made entering the country such a gamble in the first place.
